A major problem of mounting courses of study in curriculum and teaching has been the lack of a satisfactory British text-book. There are American text-books, but they do not suit our needs. Text-books are useful because they define the field and its problems for both stafT and students.

A good text-book would need to be written by someone who was able to combine practical experience of research and development in curriculum and teaching with an extensive knowledge both of the literature and of research and development projects in which he or she had not participated. I am not equipped for this task in the extent of my reading or my knowledge of the work of the many projects carried out in recent years. But it may be that no one is.

Accordingly, I have written this ‘book instead of a text-book’ in the hope that it will serve until an adequate text-book can be written.

This attempt falls short in that if offers a highly personal view. I believe that a text-book should present a thesis about the field it covers; but one which takes account of a wider range of work and experience than I have been able to master. This book looks outwards from the work of my colleagues and myself consequently its over- representation tends to over-estimate its importance, by implication if not by intention